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The Impact of Marcus Garvey by Dr. John Henrik Clarke

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940 the role of the
British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising
expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of
African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign
political entity in world affairs was still a dream without
fulfillment.

After
the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the United States would
enter, in a formal way, what had been up to that date strictly a
European conflict. Marcus Garvey's prophesy about the European scramble
to maintain dominance over the whole world was now a reality. The
people of Africa and Asia had joined in this conflict but with
different hopes, different dreams and many misgivings. Africans
throughout the colonial world were mounting campaigns against this
system which had robbed them of their nation-ness and their basic
human-ness. The discovery and the reconsideration of the teachings of
the honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey were being rediscovered and
reconsidered by a large number of African people as this world conflict
deepened.

In 1945,
when World War II was drawing to a close the 5th Pan-African Congress
was called in Manchester, England. Some of the conventioneers were:
George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B. Dubois, Nnamdi Azikiwe of
Nigeria, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. Up to this time the previous
Pan-African Congresses had mainly called for improvements in the
educational status of the Africans in the colonies so that they would
be prepared for self-rule when independence eventually came.

The
Pan-African Congress in Manchester was radically different from all of
the other congresses. For the first time Africans from Africa, Africans
from the Caribbean and Africans from the United States had come
together and designed a program for the future independence of Africa.
Those who attended the conference were of many political persuasions
and different ideologies, yet the teachings of Marcus Garvey were the
main ideological basis for the 5th Pan-African Congress in Manchester,
England in 1945.

Some
of the conveners of this congress would return to Africa in the ensuing
years to eventually lead their respective nations toward independence
and beyond. In 1947, a Ghanaian student who had studied ten years in
the United States, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah returned to Ghana on the
invitation of Joseph B. Danquah, his former schoolmaster. Nkrumah would
later become Prime Minister. In his fight for the complete independence
for the Gold Coast later to be known as Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah
acknowledged his political indebtedness to the political teachings of
Marcus Garvey.

On
September 7, 1957, Ghana became a free self-governing nation, the first
member of the British Commonwealth of Nations to become self-governing.
Ghana would later develop a Black Star Line patterned after the
maritime dreams of Marcus Garvey. My point here is that the African
Independence Explosion, which started with the independence of Ghana,
was symbolically and figuratively bringing the hopes of Marcus Garvey
alive.

In the
Caribbean Islands the concept of Federation and Political union of all
the islands was now being looked upon as a realizable possibility. Some
constitutional reforms and changing attitudes, born of this awareness,
were improving the life of the people of these islands.

In
the United States the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing
segregation in school systems was greeted with mixed feelings of hope
and skepticism by African-Americans. A year after this decision the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides and the demand for equal pay
for Black teachers that subsequently became a demand for equal
education for all, would become part of the central force that would
set the fight for liberation in motion.

The
enemies of Africans, the world over were gathering their counter-forces
while a large number of them pretended to be sympathetic to the
African's cause. Some of these pretenders, both Black and White, were
F.B.I. and other agents of the government whose mission it was to
frustrate and destroy the Civil Rights Movement. In a different way the
same thing was happening in Africa. The coups and counter-coups kept
most African states from developing into the strong independent and
sovereign states they had hoped to become.

While
the Africans had gained control over their state's apparatus, the
colonialist's still controlled the economic apparatus of most African
states. Africans were discovering to their amazement that a large
number of the Africans, who had studied abroad were a detriment to the
aims and goals of their nation. None of them had been trained to rule
an African state by the use of the best of African traditional forms
and strategies. As a result African states, in the main, became
imitations of European states and most of their leaders could
justifiably be called Europeans with black faces. They came to power
without improving the lot of their people and these elitist governments
continue until this day.

In most
cases what went wrong was that as these leaders failed to learn the
lessons of self-reliance and power preparation as advocated by Marcus
Garvey and in different ways by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois,
Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Africa became infiltrated by foreign
agents. Africans had forgotten, if they knew at all, that Africa is the
world's richest continent, repository of the greatest mineral wealth in
the world. They had not asked themselves nor answered the most critical
question. If Africa is the world's richest continent, why is it so full
of poor people? Marcus Garvey advocated that Africans control the
wealth of Africa. He taught that control, control of resources, control
of self, control of nation, requires preparation, Garveyism was about
total preparation.

There is still
no unified force in Africa calling attention to the need for this kind
of preparation. This preparation calls for a new kind of education if
Africans are to face the reality of their survival.

Africans
in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West
Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to
this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most
of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave
ships dropped us off. In the 500 year process of oppression the
Europeans have displaced our God, our culture, and our traditions. They
have violated our women to the extent that they have created a bastard
race who is confused as to whether to be loyal to its mother's people
or its fathers people and for the most part they remain loyal to
neither. I do not think African people can succeed in the world until
the hear again Marcus Garvey's call: AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, THOSE AT
HOME AND ABROAD.

We must regain our
confidence in ourselves as a people and learn again the methods and
arts of controlling nations. We must hear again Marcus Garvey calling
out to us: UP! UP! YOU MIGHTY RACE! YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH WHAT YOU WILL!

The
late Dr. John Henrik Clarke, a pre-eminent African-American historian,
author of several volumes on the history of Africa and the Diaspora,
taught in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter
College of the City University of New York.